Tell us a bit about I Am Acrylic
Hello! We’re Brendan Fan and Ruth Williams. We met whilst studying fine art back in the 90s, and we’ve been making jewellery under the name I Am Acrylic for nearly 20 years now.
I Am Acrylic kind of started by accident! Brendan made me a keyring for my birthday in 2004 using a mechanical fretsaw that we’d borrowed from my Dad and some scrap acrylic that we’d found. I was working in Magma at the time (design/gift shop in London) and the owner suggested we should make some to sell. So we made some, and they sold!
Almost 20 years later, we’re still cutting everything out on our fretsaw, and we’re still making little birds now.
We were based in London for many years and relocated to Bristol (near where Brendan grew up) in 2017. We opened up a little shop on Christmas Steps in the centre of Bristol, have our studio at the back of the shop, and live upstairs.
Over the years we’ve sold our designs in lots of amazing independent shops, museums, and galleries in the UK and abroad, and at markets around London and the UK.
We’ve worked on some fantastic commissions and collaborations and we were so thrilled to be asked to develop the “Lemon on a Pewter Dish” range with Kettle’s Yard.
Tell us more about your studio and ways of working
We work fairly evenly on the business together, with a healthy competition between us as to whose designs are selling better, with our favourite bit of the job being developing new designs!
We love the process of cutting out all of our designs on a mechanical fretsaw and finishing off everything by hand, and enjoy the design challenges it presents. When designing, we have to really consider how to translate a complex design into something that can be cut out on the saw.
When we first started making stuff, we used off-cuts from our local acrylic fabricator, inspired by the colours available to create our designs. Over the last five years or so, we’ve been trying to get back into this way of working more.
Our “Little Layered Lump” necklaces have been a great way to use the awkward off-cut shapes left over from cutting out our regular range from a sheet of acrylic. We’ve also been able to use other makers off-cuts in this way as well, with over 400 little lumps now in happy homes across the world!
What inspired your Kettle’s Yard range?
Our range of jewellery for Kettle’s Yard is based on the single fresh lemon on a pewter dish that you can find in the dining room of the house. It’s deliberately placed near Joan Miró’s Tic Tic, to mirror the yellow dot in the painting.
It was great to see the iconic fresh lemon in real life when we visited Kettle’s Yard and so exciting to then see our jewellery range in the shop!
We also found the pewter dish listing in Jim Ede’s inventory lists in the library room. It was fun to find out that it had been purchased from Brompton Road with money gained by selling a radiator. It was marked £16 but he got it for £8 as it was the first sale on a Monday morning!
If you were to buy yourself a gift from the Kettle’s Yard Shop, what would it be?
When we visited Kettle’s Yard we bought pretty much one of all of the cards Hadley Paper Goods has designed for the shop. The illustrations of the objects in the house are so beautiful! We’re also huge fans of Alfred Wallis and jigsaw puzzles, so we’d probably get one of those too!
Shop I Am Acrylic
Kettle’s Yard has collaborated with Bristol-based jewellery makers I Am Acrylic to produce an exclusive range of jewellery based on the iconic lemon.